King Dork Approximately (8 page)

So, Queerview High School. It had to be better than Hellmont, it just had to be. And while I couldn’t go so far as to say I was looking forward to it, I could see some definite pros among the cons. One of the cons was that as awful as Hillmont High was, we’d been there for a year and a half and we knew precisely how things failed to function there, while Clearview’s horrors were yet to be discovered. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, they say, but when all’s said and done, it’s still the devil you’re talking about. The devil is bad.

I had no illusions. Closing Hillmont High would do nothing whatsoever to change the senseless, sadistic structure of society and the universe, and I had no doubt that Clearview was crawling with normal people every bit as vicious as those we had known in … the other place. But Sam Hellerman and I were pretty good at navigating the beast-infested seas of normalcy, and Sam Hellerman was actually a genius. With his hand on the tiller of our ramshackle skiff, I had no doubt we’d manage. Plus, no Mr. Schtuppe. No Ms. Rambo. No Mr. Donnelly. In a way, Mr. Teone had given us a great and precious gift. The only possible improvement would have been if the buildings were to be razed, the earth salted, and all the psychotic normal perpetrators led away in chains. But let not the horrible be the enemy of the slightly less than terrible, if I have that saying right. Any way you sliced it, there were definitely pros, no doubt about it.

Now, those of you from the future who have already seen
Halls of Innocence
will be surprised to learn that Hillmont High was closed down. At the end of the program, Jake dashes up the school steps and says, “It’s great to be back,” and there’s a
freeze-frame on his enormous toothy smile, over which there’s a caption that says:

Well, of course, no one, not even the worst normal person ever to walk the earth, had ever or would ever actually be glad to be at Hillmont High School, let alone smile at the thought. But the bit about “Mr. Cabal” is true. He was still at large. And that worried me. It worried me a lot.

I didn’t get a chance to speak to Sam Hellerman about the letter and our Clearview strategy till the day after the day after Christmas. When I arrived at Toby’s Record Hut on El Camino to meet him, he was already there looking through the New Arrivals bins.

One of the few great things about the times we live in is that the normal people of the world have recently reached the misguided conclusion that compact discs are better than vinyl LPs. They’re wrong about this, of course, as they are about almost everything. All the great rock and roll recordings were made on analog equipment, and they were specifically engineered to sound right when reproduced on vinyl. Plus, the CDs of those recordings have often been remastered to try to make them match the awful sounds of our contemporary recordings. (For example, go listen to the CD of COC 39105: I promise it will hurt your ears. And not in a good way.) Unless you want, for some reason I can’t fathom, to listen to the terrible stuff they’re putting out now, you’re way better off just putting on the damn Stones record.

But the normal people don’t realize this, and they’ve been
buying their dumb CDs, getting rid of their record players, and discarding their vinyl LPs for years and years now. Result: used vinyl is everywhere, and there has never been a cheaper time to acquire it. You can walk into a place like Toby’s with fifteen dollars and come out with six great albums stupidly abandoned by their original normal owners. Sometimes they even leave them out on the street in milk crates. I picked up the entire Alice Cooper catalog on Vista View Terrace Avenue just the other week. Morons.

People from the future: you should have been there. People from now: now’s your chance. You can bet it won’t last forever.

Sam Hellerman had his headphones on, as he always did lately, but he was still flicking through the records calling out albums and their ridiculously low prices, and putting the good ones aside.

“BS 2607, three fifty,” he said. “S CBS 82000, four fifty. ASF 2512, one dollar …”

Now, you’ve probably noticed this thing we’ve been doing of referring to records by their catalog numbers rather than the titles, and maybe I should explain. Except that there isn’t an explanation. It serves no useful purpose. Hence, obviously, it’s a thing worth doing. Sam Hellerman started it one day, saying “You know, Henderson, I think I actually might like EKS 74071 better than EKS 74051.” I was mystified but went along with it, nodding silently in that way I do, till I figured out from the other stuff he was saying that he was talking about the Stooges. I caught on that EKS stood for Elektra Records, and that he was saying he liked
Funhouse
better than the self-titled debut album. (To which I say: no duh.) So I joined in. It’s like a fun, really dumb secret code. We started out with the obvious ones pretty much everyone knows, like BS 2607 or 2409-218. But some of them are really hard, and you wind up
having to do a lot of research after some conversations just to find out what the hell you’ve been talking about. I even take notes sometimes.

Sam Hellerman is way better at this game than I am, of course. The guy seems to know every catalog number of every record by heart. Maybe he prepares a list the night before just to impress me. Either way, it does. Impress me, I mean. Sam Hellerman is like that. He just randomly starts doing something stupid and before too long it becomes a well-established custom and you soon forget that people ever did anything different.

One of the records we found at Toby’s that day was APLPA-016, the Australia-only issue of AC/DC’s second album,
T.N.T.
, which is perhaps the finest hard rock record ever released. This was the first pressing, with the kangaroos on the labels. I’d never actually seen one. It was five dollars rather than fifty cents, because it was an “import,” but it was certainly well worth five dollars of Christmas money. We walked out of there with twenty LPs between us, and we barely spent thirty bucks.

So APLPA-016 got me thinking, and later on the bus I asked Sam Hellerman if he’d ever noticed that Shinefield’s drumming when we covered “Live Wire” was much less retarded than it was when we played our own songs. And of course, he had noticed.

We spent the rest of the bus ride engaged in exaggerated, sarcastic mimicry of Shinefield’s awful drumming, using our hands as sticks on the seats in front of us and augmenting that by making various drum noises with our mouths. When we were asked to leave the bus and had to get out and walk the rest of the way, we had to use our arms to carry the records
instead of using them to mimic Shinefield’s eccentric sense of timing and rhythm, but the conversation continued.

Sam Hellerman noted that we had tried to explain the concept of “space,” and beats, and regular tempo, and rests, and eighth notes to Shinefield till we were blue in the face, but it never did any good. Shinefield always agreed enthusiastically that good drumming had to be minimal enough so you could detect, say, where beat one was going to fall, and—though this might be pushing it—where beat one stood in relation to all the other beats. And he would say things like “Totally, dude” and flash us a grin that overflowed with eager camaraderie, if “camaraderie” is the one where you’re all on the same team saying “Okay, boys, let’s get ’em.” But then the song would begin and he would be even worse than before.

“The only way to improve his drumming on our songs would be to kick him out of the band,” said Sam Hellerman, and he added that in his opinion, Shinefield played “Live Wire” better because it was only a cover and he didn’t care enough about it to mess it up by trying to make it all special.

“Wouldn’t it be great,” I said, “if we could somehow get him to play ‘Live Wire’ while we played our songs?”

Sam Hellerman stopped in his tracks.

“Say that again, Henderson,” he said. Like a scene in a movie where someone says something that turns out to be the key to the big dilemma and another person tells him to say it again so the audience’s attention can be drawn to it without any possibility of missing it. In short, there was evidently something to this idea, in the world of Sam Hellerman.

“What?” I said, playing my assigned role as best I could for the moment.

“What you just said. Say it again.”

“You mean, ‘Fuck you, Hellerman’?”

“You didn’t say that,” said Sam Hellerman woundedly.

My eyes said, “I know, man, I just felt like saying it for some reason. No offense.”

But even though I wouldn’t play along with the “say that again” game, Sam Hellerman is a genius, and I could see that faraway genius look in his eyes. And of course he wouldn’t tell me his specific plan right then. And of course we had to sit for a while at the bus stop in front of Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway pretending not to look at Jeans Skirt Girl. And of course Sam Hellerman was listening to his tape rather than talking to me, making surreptitious notes and swaying from side to side like he was having a fit or something. And of course I sat there too, though I felt like a big idiot, because I was just so curious as to what he was going to propose in the end that I had to stick it out so I’d get to hear it. As with the letter, I was a prisoner of his cockeyed genius, if cockeyed isn’t too strange of a thing to call a person’s genius. Basically, I just had to know.

Jeans Skirt Girl had climbed into the green station wagon, and Sam Hellerman had switched off his tape player, just as the thought struck: the letter! I’d forgotten all about it in the excitement about APLPA-016. I hadn’t yet had a chance to discuss the switch to Clearview High School and compare notes with Sam Hellerman on the pros and cons.

“So,” I said. “Queerview.”

“What?” he said.

“Queerview.”

“What?” he said.

I decided to make my meaning clearer.

“Clearview,” I said.

“Stop saying that,” said Sam Hellerman. “You sound like a lunatic.”

I patiently explained that what I meant was that I’d seen the letter at last and that I had been attempting, using as few audible words as possible, as is my wont, to introduce the topic of how it looked like we’d be attending Clearview High School in the new year. Is it “wont”? I think it’s “wont,” though that’s weird.

“If we’re not killed by Y2K, that is,” I added with my eyebrows.

Now, I have no idea how astute you, my public, may be. But it occurs to me that some of you possibly will have some idea already of what Sam Hellerman was going to say next. If so, I congratulate you, because I’m obviously not anywhere near as good as you are at astuteness, and it came as a complete surprise to me.

“Clearview?” he said. “I’m not going to Clearview. I’m supposed to go to Mission Hills.”

And again, if the astute among you who saw that coming also already knew that my response to this was to sit on the bench, remaining aloof from reality, my blood running cold and sweat bedewing my brow, wishing desperately that there were a kitchen table next to the bus stop just so I could tip it over? Well, you were right about that, too. You’re good.

Sam Hellerman and I would be going to different high schools.

It was a con. A definite con.

As those of you from the future knew all along, January 1, 2000, dawned on a changed world. Computer irregularities had caused an instant worldwide financial collapse. Huge regions of the western United States were rendered uninhabitable by the failure of the electrical grid and lack of water, while nuclear plants, their automated temperature control systems disabled, quickly melted down and spewed radiation throughout the countryside. The world’s great nations, seeing their security endangered, let loose their missiles simultaneously, wiping out all but ten percent of the earth’s population. Soon mutant creatures roamed the land, most notably a gigantic fire-breathing lizard and an enormous angry moth: together they laid waste to cities, brushing humans aside like they were so many ants. Now we, the surviving remnant of humanity, live a harsh existence in underground caves, enslaved by a mutant race of superintelligent cats and forced to labor for the entirety of our short lives under the brutal conditions of the North American kibble mines. Only the few among us, the Resistance, continue the struggle to preserve our race, quietly gathering the components with which to assemble a giant laser pointer, a vacuum cleaner, and a spray bottle to distract and drive off our feline overlords and reclaim our ruined planet.

Yeah, no: that didn’t actually happen. Too bad, Hellerman. We’ll get ’em next millennium.

Not that the real, actual Y2K was any picnic. New Year’s Eve was spent at a gruesome party at Shinefield’s house where I was the only person not drunk and/or stoned.

Now, there was a time, I believe, long, long ago, when stoner music, or rather, the music stoners liked to listen to,
tended to be heavy, bluesy, rock and roll, like Sabbath, Rush, Hendrix, Zeppelin, that kind of thing, plus Pink Floyd for the part at the end where they lay back on the floor looking at the ceiling and talking about how bedrooms were like suitcases for people or how if you had a map that was the same size as the world you could move there and live on it instead, thus solving pollution and overpopulation. But aside from a little Led Zeppelin the music at this party was uniformly terrible, endless formless musician-y “jams” with songs that went nowhere, lasted forever, and were so busy and arrhythmic that it made me kind of hate Thomas Edison for having invented the recording technology that would eventually allow them to be put on their stupid CDs and unleashed on an innocent public.